Steve Walker, founder, president and CEO of Evari in Peterborough, is shown with a rotor for a turbocompressor the company is developing with the help of a federal Department of Energy grant to make heat pumps greener and more efficient, particularly in the sub-freezing cold. (Courtesy photo)
A New Hampshire company will use a federal grant to bring space-worthy compressor technology down to Earth to better heat and cool people’s homes.
The $1.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will help Evari Inc. of Peterborough in its development of a high-output, low-energy-use turbocompressor that can ultimately be used in home and commercial building heat pumps and mini-splits.
Existing systems struggle to generate heat in extreme cold temperatures.
“The big takeaway of what our technology does is we are much more efficient over a broad temperature range. We have a much broader temperature range,” said Steve Walker, Evari’s founder, president and CEO. “In other words, it’s a heat pump that can truly work here in New England, whether you’re talking about Caribou, Maine, or points south all winter. The current technology really does not do so well in the extreme cold.”
The term “heat pump” is a broad, generic term applied to installations that use electricity to provide both heating and cooling. A basic heat pump consists of a compressor, two heat exchangers and an expansion valve. The compressor is the heart of a heat pump.
A mini-split also warms air for heat and chills air for cool, but it is a ductless, usually a standalone, unit.
Evari is perfecting turbocompressor technology that not only works in a much broader range of temperatures to create heat but does so with less electricity and with fewer pollutants.
In terms of energy use, Evari expects its technology will make heat pumps 50% more energy efficient.
As for pollutants, said Walker, “we eliminate the very polluting refrigerants. To be clear, it still uses the refrigerant; we’re just using natural refrigerants, which the other technology has really struggled to do because they have oil-based lubrication.”
The Department of Energy funding comes through its Buildings Energy Efficiency Frontiers and Innovation Technologies (BENEFIT) grant program. The energy department says the program is making a total of $30 million available nationwide to advance tech that optimizes and facilitates decarbonization of building systems.
The New Hampshire congressional delegation in September lauded the grant to Evari, noting its goal to reduce both emissions and the cost of heating a home or business.
“Installing low-cost, energy-efficient technologies in homes and businesses can reduce costs and help us reach our climate goals,” said U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the senior member of the delegation. “I’m delighted to see federal funding headed to a New Hampshire business to continue its research and development of innovative heat pump technology that will save Granite Staters money on their energy bills, all while reducing carbon emissions and building a more resilient electric grid.”
Evari also got a financial boost of $7.5 million from seed financing led by Clean Energy Ventures, with participation from Clean Energy Venture Group (CEVG) angel investors and Farvatn Venture. That financing was announced in March.
“This technology represents a major leap forward in the design and precision manufacturing efficiency of affordable compressors. While turbocompressors have historically been reserved for high-cost applications, Evari makes them possible everywhere,” said Temple Fennell, co-founder and managing partner at Clean Energy Ventures.
Jonathan Bass, co-founder and director of operations at Evari, said, “The technology comes out of the aerospace industry that’s been used in space for 40 years. It’s well proven, mostly developed by NASA, and we’ve redesigned it so that it can be made in volume for low cost.”
An example of where the compressor technology is used in space is aboard the Hubble telescope, launched in 1990, to keep its internal temperature stable.
According to Walker, heat pumps worldwide represent 20% of global electricity use. And that will only grow. “This is not a small thing, and it’s growing,” said Walker. “The only thing that’s growing faster is computing, servers and what have you.”
Thus, he said, it becomes important to maximize the technology of compressors to make them greener and more efficient. The enhanced technology from the Evari compressors also makes them vibration free and silent.
Current compressors just can’t give heat pumps the “lift” to maintain warmth when it gets very cold — the higher the lift, the worse it performs, according to Bass.
“If you’re heating your home, and the home is set to 70 degrees Fahrenheit and the outside temperature is 30 degrees, your temperature lift is 40 degrees,” said Bass. “If the outside temperature is zero degrees, your temperature lift is 70 degrees.”
The company says it has no set timetable to get the compressor to the mass market.
“The DOE grant is a one-year program, so we should have a unit up here 12 months from the end of next year, up and running here and demonstrating that we can do this,” said Walker, “and how long it takes to get to market is a tough, tough question to answer.”
Once a mass market compressor is ready, Evari will either make and supply the compressors to a heat pump manufacturer, or start manufacturing heat pumps of their own.
“We’re working through just exactly what our strategy is on that. We’re prepared to go either way,” said Walker. “Basically, if the incumbent players want to work with us, great. If they don’t, that’s okay, too.”
Added Bass, “One thing we can probably say with a certain level of certainty is we’ll always make the compressor. Whether or not we make the heat pump that the compressor goes into is up for debate.”
Since 1992, Walker has worked in fields dedicated to better, greener ways to produce energy. For many years, he was founder, president and CEO of New England Wood Pellet.
Evari, founded in 2021, has about a dozen full-time employees. Their effort now is to perfect a new technology compressor that can be duplicated en masse during the manufacturing process.
“That’s part of what this very critical stage we’re in now is designing this, so we don’t make that next job unnecessarily hard,” said Walker.
